HEY, SPEAKING OF CRAZY CAT LADIES: Kamala Harris’ new climate director said she is hesitant to have children because of climate change threats.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign hired a new climate director who has frequently said the effects of climate change are part of what’s stopping her from having children.
Camila Thorndike, who previously worked in the Senate managing the climate portfolio of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was given the title of climate engagement director for the Harris for President campaign in September 2024, according to her LinkedIn page.
Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Thorndike said on several occasions that she considers climate change a factor when deciding whether to have kids.
“I was 15 when I first saw the climate ‘hockey stick’ graph. I realized that this skyrocketing arrow of temperature would take place in my lifetime. All of the big milestones of life that I was looking forward to would be in the context of this big global crisis. It led to the question of whether or not to have kids – which is still a big question for me – where I would put down roots, what my family would do,” Thorndike said in 2018 when she was the D.C. campaign director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Again in November 2019, Thorndike described it as an “ethical question that keeps me up at night.”
“I have always been someone who enjoys children and loves the idea of a family, and that’s why I have wrestled with this, because my logical mind and the facts of the future I can see bearing down on us are not supportive of the life I would want for them,” she told Yahoo News at the time.
Curiously, this doomsday loop has been around since 1970 (1968, if you include Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb into the equation, and you should), and yet somehow, the Final Countdown never quite arrives:
1983. NBC News. We are all going to die by the 1990's because of climate change. 😂 pic.twitter.com/YZvG7cvc89
— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 31, 2023
You should see how the media went out of its way to terrify people during the previous decade (when global cooling was all the rage):
As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2018 on the Blueanon left comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.
Eventually, the doomsday mindset started to have a result among the true believers, as I wrote in a post at EdDriscoll.com in 2011 headlined “In Search of the Missing Frisco Families.” San Francisco, on its way to becoming Detroit by the Bay, was concurrently “becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines,” as a headline at the San Francisco Examiner noted in 2011. Three years prior, in an effort to save the planet, the puritans at the San Francisco Chronicle explored how readers could throw “less-is-more birthday parties:”
Forget the twisty straws, Tootsie rolls and Dora the Explorer plates with matching cups, hats and tablecloth. There are signs that more parents would like to.
Anxious about the economy, global warming and our national image as people who would rent a limo for a kid’s party while a polar bear’s ice floe melts, many are toning down the trappings of that classic annual ritual, the blowout birthday party. They are saying no to plastic toys and water bottles, paper plates, gift wrap and new toys. There is even a modest backlash against the goody bag, the sack of candy and plastic knickknacks usually thrust into each sticky hand at the end of parties.
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“There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” said Sarah Lane, a founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values. “You should see what gets thrown away. It’s disgusting.”
Trust me, there are numerous things more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party in San Francisco.
On the flipside, the Politico warned its readers in April about — I hope you’re sitting down for this! — The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.
This just in: religious people seek to make babies!
UPDATE: In addition to everything else going wrong in the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy spent his timeout as Spock absolutely terrifying the nation:
UPDATE (9/15/24): The enviro-leftists at the L.A. Times have a similar mindset: